Under the Sign of the Clock: Queer Time, AIDS Time and Clery's Clock

Abstract

In this essay, I focus on the 1987 song ‘Under Clery’s Clock’, by Irish punk band The Radiators and written by Philip Chevron, also of The Pogues. The song was simultaneously a groundbreaking early representation of gay identity in Irish music, Chevron’s own coming out, and the first AIDS charity song in Ireland. I draw on theories of queer time and recent literary studies of form to emphasize the song’s impact in its cultural contexts. Offering a remarkable representation of the emergence of a specifically Irish gay identity during the 1980s AIDS crisis, the song tries to synch gay love within the temporal structures of family and nation—figured most clearly in the song’s titular clock, a Dublin signpost for courting couples. The song connects queer longings for a visible place in the culture to a heteronormative temporal and cultural form of meeting under a public clock. Situating the song in the cultural and arguable invented history of the clock, I argue that this gesture of inclusion is more intervention than accommodation, a figure of queer resistance in a culture that rendered gay identity so often invisible and illegible.